Announcements of new Microsoft technologies on the first day of MIX'11. Great review!

Yesterday, the first day of the largest developer conference held by Microsoft to showcase the latest innovations of the company in the areas of web and mobile technologies. During the plenary report, which opened the first day of the conference, Microsoft announced a number of new technologies and products, which will be discussed in this article.

Let me remind you that MIX is not just announcements of technologies, but also numerous technical reports, of which 125 will be presented at MIX'11, 47 of which will be read by invited experts and third-party speakers. Description of the MIX'11 conference topics can be found in this article .
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The first day of MIX'11 brought us interesting news on the following products and technologies:

• Internet Explorer 10, HTML5 Labs, new demos and performance tests;
• additional tools ASP.NET MVC 3;
• new version of Orchard CMS 1.1;
• new features of cloud services Windows Azure;
• announcement of the next conference for developers;
• and ... a demonstration of Windows on the ARM processor!

Below are the details on these topics.

Before MIX

Some time before the conference, some things appeared on the network, about which I would like to tell separately.

Silverlight 5 Beta

First, it was officially announced that during the conference a new version of Silverlight 5 Beta will be introduced, which will add a ton of new features, for example, 3D graphics. All announcements and demonstrations will be presented today on the second day of the conference. Do not forget to watch at 20-00 (Moscow) a live broadcast of the plenary report of the second day of the conference at http://live.visitmix.com/ . Today will be presented new technologies related to Silverlight and Windows Phone 7.

Cool cocktails

Developers and users on the Microsoft platform will be happy to learn about the emergence of cool cocktails representing Microsoft products. This gift was created by the developers of Cocktail Flow - an application for Windows Phone 7, which offers dozens of cocktails of various types. Now developers who work in Visual Studio have their own cocktail, which can be easily made at home.



During the MIX conference, the Cocktail Flow program becomes free for users and they get the opportunity to download a package of new themed cocktails. Details of this promotion can be found here http://cocktailflow.com/mix11/ .

Windows 7 share outperformed Windows XP

Good news arrived some time before the start of the conference: Windows 7, released just 1.5 years ago, already overtook Windows XP in some markets: the USA, Australia, the UK and others. Records of sales that the OS installs talk about the great success of Windows 7 around the world.

Microsoft Office for Mac Service Pack 1

This does not apply to the main topic of the conference. It just so happened that on the first day of MIX'11, the first fix pack for Office for Mac was released. Take him out of here .

MIX'11

So, the first day of the conference brought a lot of news on Microsoft technologies. Consider them in more detail.

Internet Explorer 10

Probably the biggest theme of the first day of the conference was the announcement and demonstration of new features in Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 1. Let me remind you that Platform Preview is IE issues that offer developers the opportunity to familiarize themselves with new technologies that are added to Internet Explorer. However, Platform Preview is not intended for daily use, as it lacks basic user interface functions.

First of all, what's new in IE10 PP1:

• CSS3 Multi-column Layout ( link );
• CSS3 Grid Layout ( link );
• CSS3 Flexible Box Layout ( link );
• CSS3 Gradients ( link );
• EcmaScript5 Strict Mode;

A full description of these innovations is available in the developer’s guide at this address . Download the new version of IE10 PP1 at the following link where release information, tests, demos and more are available.

In addition, the developers reported on their blog that in the next version of Platform Preview, CSS3 support will expand with two more specifications: CSS3 Transitions ( link ) and CSS3 3D Transforms ( link ). The finished implementation and use of these standards was demonstrated from the MIX scene during the report. The next public version of IE with their support is expected within 8-12 weeks from today.

An extension of the HTML5 Labs lab was announced, in which developers have access to implementations of some standards for Internet Explorer, which are in the process of approving specifications. The site http://html5labs.interoperabilitybridges.com/ has been updated both in terms of design and content, now two more implementations of draft standards are available for Internet Explorer:



You can use HTMl5 Labs to test IndexedDB, WebSockets, FileAPI and Media Capture API ( coming soon) for Internet Explorer.

The developers have prepared a series of demonstrations that allow to evaluate the new features:

• Try Strict Mode - check your browser for EcmaScript 5 Strict Mode;
• Tweet Columns - check your browser for support for CSS3 Multi-column Layout ;
• Griddle - check your browser for support for CSS3 Grid Layout;
• CSS3 Flexbox Flexin ' - check your browser for support for CSS3 Flexible Box Layout;
• The Grid System - check your browser for support for CSS3 Grid Layout;
• CSS Gradient Maker - check your browser for support for CSS gradients;
• SVG Gradient Maker - check your browser for support for SVG gradients;

In addition, released two demonstrations that allow you to test the performance of the browser when working with graphics:

FishBowl Benchmark

A browser test for working with graphics with simultaneous use of multiple graphics technologies. Check your browser for graphics performance.



Paintball

Test browser for speed with HMTL5 Canvas.



During his plenary report, Dean Hachamovitch showed many interesting implementations of modern websites. In particular, a new interesting project FourSquare was demonstrated, which offers new experience with the help of modern web standards to service users:



Go to http://foursquareplayground.com/ and see for yourself how interesting it is.

Another site - the official site Bon Jovi also offers a new experience to its visitors. On it, you can mount the video directly in the browser using several cameras that were used to record the concert.



See for yourself on http://director.bonjovi.com/

The world's largest pacman browser was shown, in which you yourself can create levels and rooms:



Rate it yourself at http://worldsbiggestpacman.com/

More than a hundred different sites that already use rich graphics and graphics acceleration in the browser are available at http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/ .

Windows and Internet Explorer running on ARM!

During the plenary report, Stephen Sinofsky took the stage, who is responsible for developing Windows at the company and after several graphic and other demonstrations surprised the public by demonstrating the platform on which all the demonstrations were working. It turned out that Windows and Internet Explorer were demonstrated running on an ARM 7 processor with a frequency of 1 GHz.



As you can see, the work on porting Windows to the ARM architecture continues successfully.

Next Developer Conference

In the course of the plenary report, another major conference for Microsoft developers was announced in 2011. It will be held in the United States from September 13 to September 16, 2011:



Bookmark, for sure the new technologies Microsoft will be presented at the conference.

ASP.NET MVC3

After demonstrating the new features of Internet Explorer 10, Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman took the stage and talked about web development and ASP.NET.



It was told about the update package manager Nuget 1.2 for .NET-projects and its official website. Then there was a big announcement about updating the package of tools for ASP.NET MVC 3:



Key announcements:

• the new version of ASP.NET MVC will include the javascript-library Modernizer and the latest version of jQuery;
• ASP.NET MVC 3 tools will get HTML5 support, project templates will contain markup based on HTMl5 semantic tags;
• publicly presented an updated version of the Entity Framework 4.1 with support for Code First;
• Presented and demonstrated new Visual Studio tools for scaffolding when working with MVC3.

After that, the public was shown how to work with WebMatrix, its integration with Nuget, the use of templates from the TemplateMonster.com resource and the rapid creation of a modern website.

Orchard CMS 1.1

Then we talked about the new version of the young content management system Orchard CMS. During the report, its new version Orchard 1.1 was announced and some new features were described:

• updated administration panel interface;
• Recipe mechanism for presetting CMS;
• New site for work and customization of themes http://tuning.bind.pt/ ;
• updated portal http://orchardproject.net/gallery/ with themes and Orchard extension modules;
• Amazon integration and more

Windows Azure

At the end of the plenary report, Microsoft lifted the veil over the following technologies, which will be presented in the Windows Azure cloud service.



Innovations include the following technologies:

• The next version of Windows Azure SDK will include the new Web Deployment Tool, which will simplify the migration, management and deployment of IIS servers, websites and applications. This tool will be integrated with Visual Studio and Web Platform Installer;
• Presents Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control update with new features for organizing federated authentication based on different protocols;
• within 30 days, the final version of Windows Azure AppFabric Caching will be released, which aims to accelerate projects based on Windows Azure and SQL Azure;
• A new Windows Azure Traffic Manager cloud service has been introduced, with which Windows Azure users can flexibly manage application performance depending on geographic location;
• A preliminary version of the new features of the Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) for working with streaming video based on Information Services (IIS) Smooth Streaming is presented. It will allow you to stream Smooth Streaming video to Windows Azure Storage and provide unified access to it for devices working with Silverlight, as well as for iOS and Android Honeycomb.

In addition, a number of promotions and benefits have been announced for MSDN users. More is written here and in the main announcement .

Conclusion

The first day of MIX'11 brought a lot of interesting announcements: active development of Internet Explorer, new technologies for ASP.NET developers, a new version of Orchard CMS, new functionality of Windows Azure.

We are waiting for the second day and the new information from Microsoft on technologies Silverlight 5 and Windows Phone 7. Do not miss the broadcast of the second plenary report today at 20-00 (Moscow) at http://live.visitmix.com/ .